


A Different Path

by Tenukii



Series: We're Going to Talk about Judy [7]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Doppelganger, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Inspired by Music, Parallels, Post-Canon, The Dreamer Awakens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-06-01 03:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15133997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenukii/pseuds/Tenukii
Summary: Laura has always been the one, and Jowday has always been the zero: positive and negative, matter and antimatter, Moonchild and Mother of Abominations. They are destined to cancel one another out of existence and restore balance between the Lodges.But after Odessa, when it all begins to happen again, Laura cuts out a different path.





	1. Carrie

**Author's Note:**

> Italicized passages are lyrics from the song "Laura Palmer" by Bastille.

_Walking out into the dark, cutting out a different path_   
_Led by a beating heart_   
_All the people of the town cast their eyes right to the ground_   
_In matters of the heart_

\--

Up until then, Special Agent Dale Cooper had looked like a man who had all the answers—the way all cops looked, Carrie guessed, from the local boys all the way up to the feds and back down again.  They had all the answers whether they were the right answers or not.  Whether they were _your_ answers or not.  That’s always the way it was.

But just now, someone had taken Agent Cooper’s answers away, a _woman_ had taken his answers away, and he was lost.  They’d been trudging back to the car after driving all that distance, just to get turned away from a big white house in a dead little town, when Cooper had stopped walking right in the middle of the street.  Carrie stopped too and looked over at him, expecting more answers to come out of him in that flat, cop voice he had.

Yet no answers came, because something on Cooper’s face had changed.  _His answers are gone,_ Carrie thought.  _They’re gone_.

The special agent turned around and faced the house where he’d claimed a woman named Sarah Palmer lived, the house where he’d claimed Carrie herself had once lived as a girl named Laura.  Cooper’s face was all kinds of things now: lost, confused, mixed up, but mostly hurt.  He looked hurt that his plans hadn’t worked out the way they were supposed to.  Like God or the universe or whatever (because Carrie thought he probably wasn’t the kind of man who believed in God) had played a dirty trick on him.  Like that had hurt Agent Cooper’s feelings.

 _He looks like a little boy,_ thought Carrie, even though he didn’t, not really.  Not on the outside, anyway.

She turned around and looked up at the house too.  It sat there, big and white.  When they’d first driven up to it, Carrie had been a little jealous of whoever Cooper thought she was.  Lucky girl to grow up in a mansion like that.  Now though, it looked like the kind of house that would be haunted.  A big, white house with a big, white ghost.

Carrie’s eyes fixed on the upstairs windows, and a breeze played with a curl of hair beside her face as she imagined it, a ghost haunting the rooms up there—maybe more than one ghost, even—and what it would be like to be the girl living in one of those rooms.  Climbing out the window at night, shimmying down the drainpipe, hiding behind bushes so the ghosts couldn’t see you waiting for your boyfriend to come pick you up and take you away to safety.

Safety that would last a few hours, maybe, until it was time to come home again—or until you realized your boyfriend was even scarier than the ghosts, and you shot him in the fuckin’ head right there on the fuckin’ sofa, and then in the fuckin’ stomach after that.  And Agent Cooper had never asked her one single question about the body still sitting there three days later because he knew damn well he wouldn’t be able to understand the answers she’d give him.

When cops, and men, don’t already know the answers, Carrie had found, they usually just leave you alone.

She blinked herself out of those thoughts and looked back at Agent Cooper.  His brow furrowed, and he stared down at the street as he took a few steps forward.  Carrie watched him draw his right hand up like he was about to bend over and pick up something he’d been searching for, but instead he asked her, “What _year_ is this?”

 _He’s nuts,_ Carrie realized.  _I came all this way with a crazy man, and now he’s gonna start—_   She cut the thought short and closed her eyes to calm herself, then opened them up wide.  She blinked again, slower, and looked back up at the house.

A voice called out from another place: “ _Laura!_ ”  It was a woman’s voice—already deep and scratchy from too much alcohol and too many cigarettes, and then distorted even further, but Carrie still recognized it.  She began to tremble.

The voice really belonged to _two_ women: one named Sarah, and one named Judy.

And it really called for two women: one named Laura, and one named Carrie.

She was both of them, Laura and Carrie, one and the same.  The voice brought back all the memories of both, all at once, and she screamed out all of Laura’s pain from the depths of Carrie’s body.  Agent Cooper spun around to look at her, but Carrie and Laura went on screaming.  The lights in the house flickered out in a burst of static, followed by every other light in the silent, empty town.

When Carrie and Laura finally stopped screaming, the sound continued in echoes all around her, softened and growing increasingly muted until they faded away completely.

There was silence and darkness, and she was home.


	2. Judy

_The night was all you had_  
_You ran into the night from all you had_  
 _Found yourself a path upon the ground_  
 _You ran into the night, you can't be found_

\--

From where she huddled in the nonexistence between the worlds, Judy felt the Moonchild’s scream.  Snatching the girl away from Cooper yet again, hiding her in another reality under another name had accomplished nothing.  It gave Judy another chance to run away from them, yes, gave her a chance to flee Sarah Palmer and the big white house before Cooper could come looking for her there.  It bought her a little time to hide herself.

_But it will happen again,_ Judy thought.  _Wherever she is, he will find her, and he will bring her to me.  He will always find her, and she will always find me—because of **this**._

She formed her white hand into a fist and pounded it against her chest, where she could feel the thing inside her.  A little piece of light lay sunk into the blackness which filled her.  If one could see it, it would have looked like the Moonchild’s smile in that portrait Judy so hated: bright, gentle, and tinged with loneliness.

Judy opened her hand and splayed her fingers over her chest, digging their tips into the spare flesh that covered her breastbone.  If she could only dig it out, that tiny fragment of her nemesis!  Then she could never be found, not by the Moonchild and not by Cooper.  Then she could be safe.

With an anguished groan, Judy began to claw at her skin.  She felt only a dull physical pressure as she tore at her chest with first one, then both hands.  Her body held no blood, no pulse, no heart—not here, not now—and when her flesh ripped away in ragged strips, it was papery and dry, desiccated and crumbling like a fallen leaf.  She dug her fingers in deeper, past the bone and into the darkness.

Then she heard a voice calling her, calling out from another place: _Judy. . . ._

The call was faint and weak, not a scream but a whisper, yet she knew the voice well.  It was Phillip.  He had felt her hurting, and he wanted her to come—

_home_

—back to the Dutchman’s Lodge so he could lecture her in his nagging drawl about clawing holes into the physical form she wasn’t even supposed to possess.  And then he would lecture her more about running away when she told him the Moonchild was free again; he would tell her that it all had to end.  He would _dare_ to tell _her_ that, after he had drawn the lemniscate in steam for Dale Cooper and said, “ _This_ is where you’ll find Judy”!

Phillip called for her again, and she went to him.

The room that held his device was half-filled with steam swirling in anxiety.  As soon as Judy materialized in the midst of it, the device’s spout made a slurping noise and drew in all the steam, which condensed into an apparition of Phillip’s old human body before it could be sucked down the spout.

“ _Dam_ mit, Judy,” he growled at her when he laid his mismatched eyes on the hole in her chest.  “What in the hell.”

As Phillip moved towards her and took the tattered edges of her flesh in his hands, Judy muttered, “She’s out again, they both are.  I told you before, there’s a part of her inside me, and it’s shining.”  She didn’t think he was listening because he seemed absorbed in sticking the strips of her skin back where it belonged, like he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  Judy stumbled back from him, and the piece of her flesh he was holding tore off in his hand.

“Can’t you see it in me?” Judy snarled at him.  “Can’t you see her light burning?”

Phillip looked at her, into the hollowness of her, and shook his head.

“All I see in you is darkness, Miss Judy,” he murmured.  He came after her again, and this time she stood still and let him touch her.  When Phillip pressed her torn skin into place, it stayed there, and he closed up the hole she had made without leaving so much as a scar.  His hands felt warm against her skin, the way his steam always did.

This time, he didn’t nag or lecture.  He smoothed his hands over her chest when the hole was gone, then rested them on her shoulders.

“Why do you have a body?” Judy muttered when he didn’t say anything else.  Phillip took an exaggerated look down at himself and what he wore: the same linen suit and brightly colored shirt he’d been wearing when she brought him to the Dutchman’s.  Nothing about him had aged since then.  His face looked haggard, but it had always been haggard.  His hair was the same, shorter on the sides and spikey on the top.  His mouth was the same, with uneven teeth and a scar on his lower lip that he tended to bite until it bled.  His eyes were the same, one blue with a pinpoint pupil and one brown with the pupil always blown wide.

“Don’t you like it?” Phillip drawled in an affronted tone.  “I know I got my flaws, but you ain’t ever complained before.  Least not about how I _look_.”

“Why?” Judy repeated.

Phillip sighed, “So I can touch you.”

“You touch me without a body.”

“It ain’t the same.”  While he slid his hands down her arms and pulled her closer, he tried to explain, “I need to feel you.”  The fabric of his suit felt strange when it brushed the bare skin of her chest and stomach, and when he put his arms around her back.  Always, for the first instant when he embraced her, Judy panicked.  Being held brought back the same claustrophobia she’d felt when she became trapped in a physical form, never to return to the negative space outside the omniverse where she belonged.

But then she felt a heart beating in what had been the empty cavern of her chest, pumping blood into dry veins and bringing life into skin which had been dead tissue a minute before.  Judy put her hands up to the sides of Phillip’s face and thought, _I took away your life and your substance, yet you make me live.  You make me **real**._

Phillip whispered, “Let her come to you, Judy, or you go to her.  End it.”

Judy’s body went rigid, and she dropped her hands to his shoulders to shove him away from her.  Struggling against him was like fighting the steam through which his soul usually spoke.  He still held her in his arms even while she raged at him.

“ _End_ it?!  When she and I meet, it ends with my destruction!  We will cancel each other out, she and I—and you _want_ that.  Because you want to be— _f-free!_ ”  Judy’s voice broke on the word “free,” when she imagined Phillip unencumbered by body or emotion and rid forever of the nothing that haunted him.

Phillip drew Judy tight against him and pressed his forehead to hers, although he had to use one hand to hold her head there and the other arm around her back to keep her from pulling away.  When she finally quit struggling and stood still with her shoulders sagging and her antennae gone limp, Phillip murmured, “I don’t wanna be free, Judy.  I want you to quit hurting.  And if she’s what you say she is, she ain’t gonna destroy you.”

“She is everything I say,” Judy mumbled in a hardly intelligible voice.  “But part of her is in me, and part of me is in her.  She’s just like me, Phillip—and she’s going to tear me apart.”  She took Phillip’s head in her hands again and clenched her fingers into his hair, as if she might tear him apart too.

Phillip leaned his cheek against hers and stroked one delicate antenna between his fingertips.  Judy shuddered and relaxed her grip to spread her fingers through his hair.

She muttered a third time, “Why?”

“I told you, so I can do this.”  He tugged on the antenna.

Judy pressed her faceless head closer, so that she whispered almost directly into his mouth: “You told me, one time, that you love me.  Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Phillip seemed to contemplate the question; then he murmured back, “Because you didn’t leave me anything else.”  He kissed her thin, closed and frowning lips then asked, “Why do you let me?  ‘Cos you like it, don’t you?  That’s how I know you ain’t only a negative force, ‘cos you like being loved.”

Judy did not argue that she _was_ only a negative force, empty except for the Moonchild's smile.  She was a vacuum into which Phillip could pour love for an eternity and receive nothing in return.  If she argued, he might eventually accuse her of loving him, too.

When he kissed her again, she opened the hellish mouth that had slaughtered other men, and she returned his kiss while holding back the sharp spike that issued from the back of her throat.  Kissing was a strange, stupid thing Phillip had taught her how to do: before him, Judy had only used her mouth for birthing, for killing, or for making sound.  There was no purpose to it that Judy could fathom, but she came to enjoy it the same way she came to enjoy his touch and his need for her.  He was right; she liked being loved.

_And if the Moonchild annihilates me, she annihilates **that** too,_ Judy realized.  _If I cease to exist, I will have never existed.  Phillip will never have known me at all._

She clutched his head in her hands and kissed him harder.  Phillip made a startled noise then tightened his arms around the extreme negative force and loved her.


	3. Laura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bolded passages in this chapter are from the segment “The Virgin Universe” in The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley.

_Summer evening breezes blew, drawing voices deep from you_   
_Led by a beating heart_   
_What a year and what a night, what terrifying final sights_   
_Put out your beating heart?_

\--

Although the dark and the quiet which surrounded Laura were so thick as to be almost palpable, she no longer felt any fear.  The black silence was not keeping her from seeing the house and the street and the town—because none of those things existed anymore.  They had all been illusions, Judy’s illusions set up for Laura and Cooper’s benefit.  Laura’s scream had shattered them, and now she saw nothing because there was nothing to see.

She was not afraid, because there was nothing to fear.  She felt safe there in the nothing, because nothing was her home.  Nothing was her mother.  Nothing was her—

_Nothing was her._

All the same, she could see something within her mind’s eye: she could see herself.

**_We are come unto a palace of which every stone is a separate jewel, and is set with millions of moons._ **

**_And this palace is nothing but the body of a woman, proud and delicate, and beyond imagination fair.  She is like a child of twelve years old.  She has very deep eyelids, and long lashes.  Her eyes are closed, or nearly closed.  It is impossible to say anything about her._ **

She was not Laura Palmer anymore—or not _just_ Laura Palmer, any more than she was _just_ Carrie Page.  She had lived as each of them for a while; she had tried to be what all the people in all her lives had wanted her to be.  Laura felt like the twelve-year-old girl she envisioned—the same way she’d felt right before BOB started coming, except that now she was able to see all the people she would meet as that girl grew up.  She knew who each of those people wanted her to be, or the roles they wanted her to play: daughter and mother, homecoming queen and whore, best friend and girlfriend.  Laura had tried to fill all those roles until it got to be too overwhelming, and she felt like giving it all up to become nothing instead.

But BOB was hiding there and waiting, ready to become Laura once Laura herself had become nothing.

**_And the ring of the horizon above her is a company of glorious Archangels with joined hands, that stand and sing: This is the daughter of Babalon the Beautiful, that she hath borne unto the Father of All.  And unto all hath she borne her.  This is the Daughter of the King.  This is the Virgin of Eternity.  This is she that the Holy One hath wrested from the Giant Time._ **

Laura looked at herself, the child of twelve years old with the long lashes, proud and delicate.  The Moonchild whom Jowday, falsely named Babalon, had wrested from the Giant.  A golden light seemed to shine from all around her, even though Laura knew it was all in her mind and that she really stood in utter darkness.  The girl within the light opened her eyes, wide-set and blue, and she smiled.  She had a mouth full of very white teeth, and her smile looked wistful and a little sad.  Laura’s eyes, wide-set and blue, began to water.

“Why did it have to happen to me?” she asked the Moonchild.  “Us.  Why did it have to happen to us?”

The Moonchild said, “After Judy dreamed herself into this world, someone had to restore the balance between the White Lodge and the Black Lodge.  If the Fireman had not dreamed of us, there would have been someone else.”  Laura shook her head hard enough to make short locks of hair fly around her face.

“That’s not what I mean—not just you-and-me us,’” she muttered.  She put her hand to her neck, where she still wore Carrie’s horseshoe necklace, and she fingered the charm as she tried to put what she did mean into words.

“Why did it have to happen to _all_ of us?  And why does it _keep_ happening, over and over?  Agent Cooper followed me in, so now it’s happening to him too.”  Laura let go of the necklace and dropped her hands to her sides while she thought of all the people she’d known and all the Lauras they’d wanted her to be.

“And before that, there was Donna.  I tried to be the friend she needed, but all I did was drag her down into—into my pain and darkness.”  **_Her_** _pain,_ Laura thought even as she spoke, _and **her** darkness._   By “her” she did not mean Donna.

Speaking faster, trying to push the thought away, Laura mumbled on, “And Ronette, I nearly got Ronette killed.  I _did_ get Theresa killed.  And—and Maddie, oh God, Maddie.”  She blinked hard, and her watering eyes spilled over.  “I looked up to her so much—before, back when BOB had just started coming to me.  She was so grown up, but she didn’t treat me like a little kid, you know?  And then. . . then just a couple years later, I realized how innocent she really was.  She was _still_ so innocent when he killed her. . . killed her because of me.”

The Moonchild gazed up at Laura in silent sympathy.  Laura looked back into those wide, glowing eyes and wondered how the Moonchild could possibly understand.  No matter how much she looked like Laura, even if she _was_ some small part of Laura and implanted deep within her, she was the damn Virgin of Eternity, right?  Forever innocent, more innocent than Donna or Maddie, or Laura herself, even at twelve years old.

**_This is the Virgin of Eternity. This is she that the Holy One hath wrested from the Giant Time, and the prize of them that have overcome Space. This is she that is set upon the Throne of Understanding._ **

“I can understand, Laura,” the Moonchild whispered.

Laura retorted, “Then can you explain it?  If I’m just somebody’s dream, something the Fireman dreamed up to balance the Lodges, why did the people I loved have to hurt too?  _Good_ people, Donna and Maddie—and James, why did I hurt him so bad?  He was so. . . .”  She paused, because “innocent” wasn’t quite the right word.  Finally, she came back to the same old words she’d used in high school: “So sweet and so dumb.”

The Moonchild looked at her without answering.

“And there was Harold,” Laura mumbled.  “He helped me—he listened to me, and he hid my diary from BOB, and all I did was hurt him.  I. . . oh God.”

She had not thought about Harold Smith and what she had done to him in a long, long time even before she lived Carrie Page’s life.  The return of those memories made Laura want to scream again.

Instead, she went on in a voice flat and numb, “And Johnny. . . Johnny Horne.  I was good to him, and he loved me.  But then I left him and I never came back.  He was the only _real_ innocent, the only _really_ good person I’ve ever known.  So why did _he_ have to hurt?  Why is he _still_ hurting?!”  Laura’s voice had lost its flat quality and risen with each question.

“You’ve already answered that yourself,” the Moonchild told her.  “He loved you.  So did James and Harold, and Donna and Maddie and Ronette and Theresa.  They loved you, and the way to the White Lodge is love.”  The Moonchild reached out her hands—young, smooth hands suffused with her golden glow.  Laura smeared away her tears with the heel of one palm and dried it on her jeans before clasping the girl’s hands in hers.  The backs of Laura’s hands were beginning to wrinkle, and the blue veins crisscrossing them stood out in contrast to her skin.

She mumbled, “But love isn’t enough.  All this time, all those people hurt. . . and the balance still isn’t restored.”

The Moonchild squeezed her hands and asked, “Isn’t it?”  Laura stared at her.

After a moment, the girl released Laura and reached up to open her own face as she insisted, “There _is_ balance.  Look.”  Then she showed Laura the source of the glow surrounding her: inside, the Moonchild was full of light.

“I don’t understand,” muttered Laura.  “Where is the Black Lodge in _that_?”

“Look _harder_.”

Laura squinted into the brightness until afterimages of the glowing hole in the girl’s head burned themselves into her eyes.  At first, she thought those caused the dark spot she finally saw within the Moonchild, but then Laura realized otherwise.

It was not a dark spot but a familiar, gaping mouth.

Laura closed her eyes, and the afterimages burned fluorescent orange behind her lids.  By the time she raised them, the Moonchild had closed her face back up.

“Now do you understand?” she asked.

Laura nodded and told the Moonchild, “I’m not going to let it happen again.  No one can stop it but me.  No one can stop _her_ but me.  When I try to do what everyone else wants, she always wins—so this time _I’m_ going to choose the path and bring true balance.”

The Moonchild murmured, “Laura. . . Judy has _never_ ‘won.’  As long as you suffer, _she_ suffers.  To bring what you call true balance between the White Lodge and the Black, you would have to destroy her completely—and the only way to do that is to destroy yourself as well.”

“I know.  And I don’t care,” Laura mumbled.  When the girl looked up at her in resignation, Laura lifted her free hand and touched the Moonchild’s glistening cheek.  “I’m sorry that it isn’t what you want, but I’m tired.  I’m so fucking _tired_.  I just want it all to end.”

“Never be sorry for choosing your own path,” the Moonchild said; then she leaned up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around Laura’s neck.  Laura hugged the girl tightly with her eyes closed and her cheek pressed to the Moonchild’s hair.  She felt the warm golden glow spread from the Moonchild to surround her as well, but after a moment, Laura realized that she stood alone, embracing herself.  When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but darkness.

Laura stretched her arms out in front of her before she called out into the dark: “Agent Cooper?  Are you there?”

He replied in that calm, steady cop voice, “I’m here, Carrie.”

“Laura,” she said, “it’s Laura.  Can you come to me?  I’m reaching out for you.”

“I’m coming toward the sound of your voice,” said Agent Cooper.  “Are you okay?”

Laura told him, “I’m—I’m okay.  At least, I’m not afraid anymore.  I’m not afraid of her now.”  She felt his hands fumble past hers, then return to take hold and grip.

“Her?”  They both stood silent in the darkness for a moment; then Cooper repeated, “You aren’t afraid anymore.”

 _What do I have to be afraid of?_ Laura thought.  _I’m the Virgin of Eternity!_   She started laughing as she imagined telling him that.  She laughed until tears spilled from her eyes.

“Laura?”  His voice was not tender, the way it had always been in her dreams.  His grip was not gentle, like his kiss always was when they met time and again in the Waiting Room.  The Dale Cooper she knew never used that cop voice.

Nevertheless, she was not afraid.

She said, “No, I’m not afraid anymore, Agent Cooper.  Hold on to my hands, and I’ll take you home.”


	4. Cooper

_The night was all you had_   
_You ran into the night from all you had_   
_Found yourself a path upon the ground_   
_You ran into the night, you can't be found_

\--

Cooper thought that perhaps the world had ended when the echoes of Carrie Page’s scream died out.  As the dark silence stretched out longer and longer, he waited.  If Dale Cooper had learned anything since he first entered the town of Twin Peaks, he had learned how to wait.

He would wait until something happened, and then he would try again.  Try to find Laura and bring her to face Judy.

_And what if nothing ever happens?_

Well, then he would just wait forever.

But after awhile, the silence broke, and he heard her voice in the dark calling, “Agent Cooper?  Are you there?”

“I’m here, Carrie,” he called back.

“Laura.  It’s Laura.”

So she had remembered.  Cooper had suspected as much when she screamed like that, but now he was certain.

Laura was saying, “Can you come to me?  I’m reaching out for you.”

“I’m coming toward the sound of your voice,” Cooper told her as he started moving with his own hands outstretched.  “Are you okay?”

“I’m—I’m okay.”  Laura’s voice was tremulous over the words.  She sounded very close to Cooper now, and he began to move his hand in the air to find her.  Laura went on, “At least, I’m not afraid anymore.  I’m not afraid of her now.”

Cooper’s hands went cold at her words, as if the blood were draining out of them.  They found Laura’s hands in the darkness, and he grabbed onto her fingers to steady himself.

“Her?” Cooper demanded.  When Laura said nothing else, he repeated her claim: “You aren’t afraid anymore.”  Laura began to laugh.

He clutched her hands so he wouldn’t lose her if she turned hysterical.  But Laura’s laughter wasn’t like that—crazy maybe, like laughter over some joke he wasn’t in on, but not hysterical.

Cooper let her laugh for a minute; then he prompted, “Laura?”

She stopped laughing immediately and answered his question.  “No, I’m not afraid anymore, Agent Cooper.  Hold on to my hands, and I’ll take you home.”

\--

He felt no sense of transition except for a slow brightening as the empty blackness filled with light, red and black and white.

 _Of course, this is always going to be home for us both,_ Cooper thought—yet at the same time, he also thought, _No, not here—even if we must be joined forever, whatever it takes._   But Laura still gripped his hands, and when he tried to pull away, she used her hold to force him down into an armchair behind him.  No ordinary woman could be that strong.

\--

Laura only let go when flames crept up around the chair and Cooper was a prisoner there all over again.  She took a step away and looked down at him as he stared back from his seat amidst the fire.  He thought he saw something like a halo of gold sparks around her.

\--

But Laura wasn’t there, and when Cooper looked down at his hands, they were empty.  He sat in his usual chair in the waiting room, the one at a right angle to the other two.  Cooper thought of the lemniscate Phillip Jeffries had shown him back at the Dutchman’s, and he imagined himself as the little sphere which had circled it.  That sphere kept crossing over, over and over into the place where the two loops of the lemniscate came together.

 _This is where you’ll find Judy,_ Jeffries had said.  _There may be someone. . . did you ask me this?_

Cooper hadn’t asked where to find Judy; he’d wanted to find _Laura_.  But then, Jeffries had been obsessed with Judy back in 1989 too, the only other time Cooper had met him.  When he’d walked off the elevator from nowhere into Gordon Cole’s office in Philadelphia and said he wouldn’t talk about Judy, proceeded to talk about little _but_ Judy, then vanished into nonexistence.

 _He can’t let her go, the way I can’t let Laura go,_ thought Cooper.  He grimaced because the idea had some kind of monstrous implication he knew he hadn’t yet grasped.

Then MIKE blipped into existence in the chair catty-corner to him, and Cooper forgot about Jeffries again.  MIKE gripped the chair’s arm with his single hand and leaned forward.  His eyebrows were raised and his face earnest.

“Is it future, or is it past?” MIKE asked Cooper in the backwards-forwards patois of the waiting room,  Behind the one-armed man, the Venus de Medici forever tried to cover her nakedness with her white hands.

MIKE said, “Someone is here.”

 _There may be someone_.

MIKE vanished, and Cooper regarded his empty chair until he heard footsteps.  Even footsteps sounded backwards reverberating on that black and white floor.  Cooper looked up to see Laura Palmer walking toward him in her black velvet dress with the plunging neckline and the slit up the thigh.  Laura did not stop to sit down in the third arm chair but instead kept coming closer to Cooper until she stood only a few feet away.

“Hello, Agent Cooper,” said Laura.  “You can go out now.”

Cooper thought of the sphere poised in the lemniscate’s center and wondered which way it would roll.  He wondered, but he almost didn’t care.

 _Because I can’t save her,_ he thought as he looked up at the wide eyes and mysterious smile of the woman full of secrets.  _It doesn’t matter how far back I go or what I do to intervene, I can’t save her._

Laura closed the last bit of distance between herself and Cooper.  She leaned forward and kissed him before she put her lips to his ear and whispered, “Laura and Judy.  Two birds, one stone.  One and the same.”

“Hunh?” breathed Cooper.  Laura pulled away from him and straightened up.  Cooper stared at her, and for a moment, she gazed back.  But then Laura looked upwards, and that familiar expression of horror crossed her face.  Cooper knew it so well by now, like he knew the terrified scream that always followed.

This time, however, Laura closed her mouth and did not scream, although her eyes stayed wide and her nostrils remained flared as she kept staring up at the thing which had come for her.  Cooper looked up too; he meant only to glance then turn back to Laura, but what he saw caught and held his gaze.

The red curtains of the waiting room stretched endlessly upward until shadows consumed them, but now a low ceiling bore down upon Cooper and Laura: a swirling vortex with darkness beyond it, and a monster within it.  When Judy leaned out of her portal to nonexistence, Cooper saw an insectoid head with elongated skull, gaping maw, and flailing antennae.  If all of Judy were as utterly inhuman as that awful head, she would have been less horrible.  But the graceful neck and collarbones of a woman emerged after her head, followed by bare white shoulders broader but no less beautiful than those of the coy Medici Venus.

Cooper gawked at her, but Judy ignored him and squalled down at Laura instead in a deep, creaking voice.  When Cooper finally dragged his eyes back to Laura, her jaw had tightened and her eyes had lost their wild and frightened look.  As Judy’s negative force lifted Laura and her feet left the chevron-patterned floor, the red curtains thrashed around Laura’s body.  Nevertheless, her face showed no further sign of fear, and she did not cry out.

 _I’m going to lose her again,_ thought Cooper.  _This time I’m losing her forever._

Laura reached up with both arms toward the nightmare screeching above her.

Cooper jumped up from his chair and shouted, “Laura!  _Laura!_ ” as he ran to her.  He leapt for Laura just in time to throw his arms around her waist.  Even with his added weight, Laura’s ascension did not slow; in fact, neither she nor Judy seemed to notice his presence at all.

Before Judy could send her away again out onto another loop of the lemniscate, Laura stretched out her hands and grabbed for whatever part of the monster she could reach.  Her grasping fingers closed over Judy’s antennae and refused to let go, even when Judy wailed in fury and pain.  She tried to pull away, whipping her head from side to side, but only hurt herself more.

With a roar that sounded like the grinding of rusty machinery instead of the cry of a living being, Judy made the only move left to her and retreated, drawing both Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper into the vortex after her.

\--

On the other side, all three of them—Cooper and Laura and Judy—fell tumbling to a stone-tiled floor in a room where machinery whirred and clanked.  Only Laura landed on her feet, in a crouch from which she quickly rose.  Cooper went down on his backside, and Judy landed hard on one shoulder then skidded across the floor and into a nearby wall.

When she pushed herself up into a sitting position and lurched forward to hiss at him, Cooper noticed another difference between her and a human woman: her lower arms attached the wrong way at her elbows.  As Judy’s splayed hands supported her weight, her thumbs pointed outward and her smallest fingers inward.

Cooper remembered that once, in the waiting room, a woman had told him, _Sometimes my arms bend back_.  He tried to recall who that woman had been—the Arm’s cousin, who looked like Laura but wasn’t.

 _Are you Laura Palmer?_ Cooper had asked her.

 _I feel like I know her,_ she had replied, struggling to speak and to move limbs that were not her own, _but sometimes my arms bend back._

She looked almost exactly like Laura Palmer.  She was Laura, except Laura was dead.  Laura was dead, yet she lived.

_Laura and Judy.  Two birds, one stone.  One and the same._

Cooper scrambled to get his feet under him, then slowly stood up while watching Judy.  She opened her mouth wide until the black hole of it filled half of the space where a face should have been.  Something narrow and sharp, very much like an icicle, darted out of Judy’s mouth and retreated.

Cooper’s eyes drifted down to the black stone tiles beneath Judy’s white hands.  He knew them.  The black tiles, the white tiles bordering them, the domed ceiling over their heads. . . and the spouted mechanical device rattling and exhaling steam to his and Laura’s left.  Cooper knew that, too.

“Jeffries,” he whispered.  He glanced over at Laura, wanting to tell her to hold out some hope because they had landed in neutral, if not friendly, territory.  But Laura looked only at Judy, not at Cooper, and a moment later, his own hopes faded.

Jeffries’s voice with its unmistakable drawl cried out from within his device: _“Judy!”_   _Now_ Cooper grasped the implication of Jeffries’s fixation on Judy, and it troubled him.  He had heard fear in Jeffries’s voice, beneath the drawl.

Not fear _of_ Judy. . . fear _for_ her.


	5. Phillip

_If you had your gun, would you shoot it at the sky?_   
_Why?  To see where it would fall?_   
_Oh, will you come down at all?_

\--

The noises had startled Phillip Jeffries out of the depths of his device.  First came a pattern of thuds that caught his attention, then the low metallic groan of Judy’s voice.  Phillip hadn’t expected her to come back so soon, and that worried him—then he heard her hiss like an enraged snake.  That frightened him.

He exhaled a cloud of steam from the device with a rattle and witnessed Judy’s fear come to pass: the Moonchild had reached her at last.  Phillip Jeffries had never met Laura Palmer, not in any form, not in the ordinary world nor anywhere beyond it.  Yet he recognized at once the lovely woman with the wavy blonde hair and the wide-set blue eyes.  He knew her by the way she stood, with no fear left in her: back straight, neck crooked just enough for her to gaze down at Judy sprawled on the floor before her.

. . . Judy sprawled, pushing herself up with her hands to hiss at the Moonchild, opening her enormous mouth to expose the strange spike within it.  Phillip wasn’t used to seeing her like this, because despite the threatening sound she made, Judy was cowed like a cornered animal.  Phillip now regretted everything he’d told her about how she should face her adversary and how the Moonchild wouldn’t harm her.  He feared he had been very wrong.

_“Judy!”_ he cried, and her antennae twitched in the direction of his device, but she didn’t move or speak to him.  The Moonchild did not react to him at all.  Then Phillip realized a third person was there too: Dale Cooper.  The pure one, the one who had come to him seeking the Moonchild, not the copy who had come seeking Judy.

Cooper stared at Judy but then turned his head to look at Phillip’s device.  His dark eyes were intent and open wide with an expression Phillip recognized: Cooper was observing, taking everything in, and when he spoke, it would be to state carefully what he thought to be factual, logical, and true.

_The perfect FBI agent, my replacement,_ Phillip thought, _curious and observant, trying to understand and to learn.  I was curious all right, but never that patient and never that calm.  So of course he’s fixated on the Moonchild sent to restore order. . . .  and me, I got lost in Judy and her chaos.  Now, they’re both going away._

An endless existence in limbo at the Dutchman’s, without Judy—it was more than Phillip could bear to contemplate.  He poured out of his device in a rush of steam.  Cooper blinked and even took a step backward; then when Phillip pulled himself together into a human apparition, Cooper looked up at his face in alarm.

“Phillip. . . ?”

Phillip muttered, “More or less,” and started to go to Judy.  However, the Moonchild whipped around to face him for the first time, and she held up her hand to halt him.  When he first glimpsed her, Phillip had thought she was close to Cooper’s age, but now her face appeared to be that of a teenager.  Her blond hair gave off a faint halo of golden light.

Phillip looked past the Moonchild to where Judy lay, and he whispered her name.  With the Moonchild facing away from her, Judy retracted the spike into her mouth and drew her limbs inward to push herself to her feet.  Once standing, Judy turned her empty face toward Phillip.

“Get back,” she growled in a creaking voice.  Her antennae lay flat against her skull, and Phillip thought of how a white horse might put its ears back when angered.

“Judy, I’m sorry—”

“ _Go!_ ”  Judy’s creaking voice became a roar, and she clenched one hand into a fist against her thigh.  With the other, she pointed at Phillip’s device.  Judy used the finger beside her thumb to point, but on her backwards hand, the gesture was disorienting.  Phillip thought Judy’s hands were beautiful, yet Cooper stared with his wide-open eyes.

“I feel like I know her,” the agent whispered, “but sometimes my arms bend back.”  Judy jerked her head towards him, and Cooper continued louder, “I met you before, a long time ago, didn’t I?  I thought you were Laura Palmer.”

As if Phillip could see through a younger Cooper’s eyes, Judy changed for him.  For an instant, she looked like the Moonchild.  Then in a flicker, the lovely young face altered: her eyes turned milky, and she opened her mouth wide in a crazed, anguished screech.  Another flicker, and she became something like a hybrid between the Moonchild and the Mother of Abominations, with white skin and a black mouth and dark eyes that seemed to be all pupil.  Still, she screamed.

Phillip groaned her name and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands.  His face was wet, and he could taste blood where he’d been biting his lip.

The voice of the Moonchild cut through Judy’s scream and said, “She _is_ Laura Palmer, and so am I.  We are dead, yet we live.  We are one and the same.”

When Phillip dropped his trembling hands, Judy looked like herself again.  He shook his head first slowly, then more and more rapidly.

“No. . . _no!_   You are the Moonchild, and she is Jowday.  Maybe you’re Laura Palmer, but she’s Miss Judy, she’s my blue rose.”

Judy’s head turned toward him again, with her antennae now quirked forward.  Then Cooper stepped up beside Phillip and laid a hand on his arm.

“They’re doubles of each other, Phillip.  I understand now.  When I became trapped in the Waiting Room, I saw what I thought was Laura’s doppelganger—but she was really Jowday. . . Judy.  The entity Gordon had us searching for all along.”

“I knew _that_ ,” Phillip mumbled.  “Why’d you think I didn’t wanna talk about her?  Gordon wanted to trap her and contain her.  I couldn’t let him do that.”

“Trapped and contained. . . .  Phillip, isn’t that what she’s done to you?” Cooper spoke gently, but he incensed Phillip all the same.

“No!” Phillip growled.  “I chose this, I chose _her!_ ”

At the same moment, Judy snarled over him to Cooper, “Then I release him!  I don’t need him anymore—take him back to where he belongs!”  She turned her head toward Phillip and screamed, “ _Go!_ ”

Judy’s rejection nearly shattered him, but he also thought, _I knew, I knew all along—and MIKE told me, she would devour me and feel nothing.  I tried to save her anyway.  And I failed._

The Moonchild was watching him.  When she began to move toward him, Phillip had to concentrate to hold himself in a physical form, and to keep from drawing back from her.  He tried to hate her, Cooper’s precious Laura, but he couldn’t manage it when he looked into her wide blue eyes.  The golden light spread from her hair to illuminate her face, neck, and shoulders.

Phillip believed that angels existed, somewhere.  Even now, a gold cross hung from his neck.  But no matter how ethereal she appeared with her sweet face and shimmering aura, Phillip knew the Moonchild was not a divine entity.  As much as he hated it, he also knew that Cooper was right, and he understood why Judy had so feared contact with the Moonchild: they were one and the same, destined to cancel each other out of existence.

The Moonchild reaffirmed that fact when she looked up at Phillip and murmured, “You won’t remember.  When we cease to be, it will be that we _never_ existed.  You, and Agent Cooper, will be free.”

“I don’t want to be free,” Phillip said, “and I don’t want to forget.”

She reached up a gold-lit hand and touched his temple, next to his brown eye.  Judy used to touch Phillip there, and the Moonchild nodded when she saw the stricken look in his eyes.

“You will,” she whispered.

\--

To be continued


	6. Cooper

_If you had your gun, would you shoot it at the sky?_  
_Why?  To see where your bullet would fall?_  
_Oh, will you come down at all?_

\--

After he asked Phillip that terrible question— _Isn’t that what she’s done to you?_ —Dale Cooper stayed silent, observing.  Taking everything in.

Judy screaming at him.  Phillip’s face taking on a stricken, burnt-out look.  The Moonchild going to him.

Yet at the same time, Cooper saw again his last moments in what he had once thought of as reality.  Friends very old and very new, gathered in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station where dear Lucy had shot his doppelganger, where Freddie Sykes had shattered BOB, where Candie had been glad she had enough sandwiches for everyone.  Where Dale Cooper thought he understood everything, and he could make it all okay again.

_Now, there are some things that will change.  The past dictates the future._

But everything had changed because Cooper didn’t understand it after all.  Because Judy dictated the future, and the past.  Because Phillip Jeffries had been right all those years ago when he said, “It was a dream.  We live inside a _dream_.”

Cooper’s past sped by, and when he thought of the one moment he’d had with Diane—Diane whom he had destroyed as surely as his doppelganger had—Cooper repeated Phillip’s words.

“We live inside a dream.”

But who was the dreamer?  Did it even matter any more?

 _I hope I see all of you again,_ Cooper had said to them, the people who were there at the end, friends very old and very new.  That had been _his_ dream, that he could make it all right and come back to the Twin Peaks which had only really existed in his heart and his mind.

The Moonchild was speaking to Phillip, telling him, “You, and Agent Cooper, will be free.”  Phillip’s face looked like it had when he laid his head down on Gordon Cole’s desk and moaned, “Ring. . . the ring.”

Phillip said, “I don’t want to be free, and I don’t want to forget.”

The Moonchild touched his face and whispered, “You will.”

Around Laura and Phillip and Cooper and Judy, the walls and ceiling began to flicker.  As the grey of the Dutchman’s stuttered, Cooper caught glimpses of black and violet beyond.  Neither Phillip nor the Moonchild reacted, but Judy drew herself down into a crouch and bent her head.  Her antennae quivered.

Whoever the dreamer was, the dream itself was ending.

\--

Cooper sat in a chair facing the Fireman.

“Agent Cooper,” the Fireman said.  “Listen to the sounds.”  The giant turned his head, and Cooper followed his gaze to a device mounted with a large phonograph horn.  A scritching, staticky sound issued from it.  Cooper squinted, puzzled at the sound’s familiarity.

“It is in our house now,” said the Fireman.  Cooper looked from him to the horn and back again.

“It is?” Cooper asked.  He didn’t understand.

The Fireman told him, “It all cannot be said aloud now.  Remember. . . four three zero.  Richard and Linda.”

The words hurt Cooper’s heart.  Although the Fireman had never expressed any judgment of him, Cooper still felt as if he had been reprimanded: _Remember how you fucked everything up?  Remember what you did to “Linda,” “Richard”?_

But then the Fireman said, “Two birds with one stone,” and Cooper realized what the giant had really meant.

“I understand,” he said.

The Fireman looked at Cooper and said to him, “You are far away.”

As Cooper flickered and went out, the phonograph horn still crackled with the sounds.

\--

The Dutchman’s Lodge had ceased to exist.  Cooper stood on the flat surface of a rocky island, under a hazy lavender sky and surrounded by a violet sea.  Small waves lapped up against the rocks, the only land in sight in any direction.

The dream was ending, and everything the dreamer had constructed was fading away.  Soon nothing would remain except the Dark Ocean, from which all the realities sprung.

The Moonchild stepped back from Phillip and turned to look at Cooper.

“Agent Cooper. . . thank you,” she said.  She dropped her left eye closed in a wink.

Cooper managed a smile and gave her a thumb’s up.

Phillip looked at him too and pleaded, “Cooper, please, we gotta stop her!  It ain’t just Judy, _she’ll_ die too, _really_ die.  You ain’t ever gonna find her again.”  Cooper looked away from him because he knew Phillip was right, and because Cooper couldn’t bear to see his look of hopeless misery any longer.  Phillip’s face reflected everything Cooper felt when he thought about the Moonchild—Laura going away.  Now Cooper could understand that she had been his whole purpose for waiting, for fighting back to himself from nonexistence, for giving away everything he had.  Laura had been his purpose for being.

When he realized that Cooper refused to listen to him, Phillip stumbled toward Judy, who still hunched on the stone ground.  He stopped a few feet away from her, but she would not turn her face toward him.  Her antenna hung limp down the sides of her head.

Phillip screamed at her, “You said you could run forever!  You said you were eternal!  You said you would devour me, but you never told me I’d still be alive after!”

Judy still did not turn to him, but she rasped, “I told you to go.  Go home, Phillip.”

“I was there already!” he shouted.  He looked at the Moonchild, whose glowing face reflected some sympathy but no pity.  Phillip’s voice fell to a normal volume and force, and he said, “You ain’t had any right to come here.  Either of you.  Both of you—one of you.”  He turned away from them, and when he trudged closer to Cooper, Cooper heard him still muttering: “Two birds from one stone.  _Ayúdeme. . . ayúdeme_.”

Judy made a low noise: a scritching, staticky sound like sizzling electricity or a stuck record.  Cooper remembered the Fireman then, and he grasped Phillip’s arm when the other man came within reach.  Phillip stood still without looking up, but the Moonchild was moving again, walking towards Judy on bare feet that did not quite touch the stones beneath them.

“Phillip!”  Cooper grabbed both of Phillip’s hands, and finally Phillip lifted his head.  The Moonchild now stood directly before Judy, where she bent and cupped Judy’s head in her glimmering hands.  Cooper tore his gaze from the Moonchild and stared into Phillip’s mismatched eyes.

“Phillip, you’ve done something incredible.  I thought I had given up everything to save Laura, and it wasn’t enough.  But I was looking at it all wrong.  Laura—she didn’t _need_ to be saved.”  Cooper glanced at the other two, and saw Judy getting to her feet.  She wasn’t frightening or grotesque anymore.  Instead, she looked like a hollow figure made of papier-mâché, something lifeless and artificial.

“What did I do?” Phillip asked, but with little interest.

“You really did give up everything, and you’ve _saved_ everything.  Judy has surrendered—because of _you_.”  Although Phillip’s eyes began to tear and he started shaking his head, Cooper went on urgently, “She loves you, Phillip.  That’s why she wanted you to go, back to live the life she took from you.  That’s why she’s letting Laura end the dream, to set you free.”

Phillip’s mouth came open, and he finally looked back at Judy and the Moonchild, who stood facing one another.  His lips formed words Cooper could barely hear: “How would you know that?”

Cooper explained to him, “Judy got into the White Lodge.  I heard the sounds—the sounds she makes, the sounds I’ve heard every time she changed something or sent Laura away.  I heard those sounds in the Lodge.”

“But what—”

“Phillip, the only way into the White Lodge is love.  Fear opens the door to the Black Lodge, but only love opens the door to the White.”

Phillip’s eyes flicked over to Cooper for a second, then returned to Judy.  He bit down on his lip, and Cooper saw blood trickle down toward his chin.  The Moonchild had let go of Judy, yet Judy did not try to escape her.

The Moonchild said, “Jowday.  You have to wake up.”

Because of her sullen submission up to that point, Cooper thought Judy would go quietly.  Phillip’s hands shook in Cooper’s, then clamped down on them when Judy threw back her head and screamed.  Cooper knew that scream; he had heard it before when he met Laura’s doppelganger in the Waiting Room.  He could hear Laura in it, until a sharp spike thrust out through Judy’s mouth and her scream became garbled and warped into inanimate sounds.

Judy dropped her head and darted it out towards the Moonchild, as if she intended to stab the girl with the spike in her mouth.  But the Moonchild lifted her right arm straight out in front of her, and Judy stopped moving.  The Moonchild drew her fingers up to her palm and pressed her thumb against the first two.  She held them there.

Judy and Phillip both shuddered.

When the Moonchild snapped her fingers, the sharp crack made Cooper jump.  Judy jumped too, gasping like a person startled out of sleep.  Her antennae stood straight up from her head, and Cooper heard the sounds one last time.  A soft flicker of static or electricity.  A needle scratching over a record.

The sphere moving over the cross of the lemniscate and starting the loop anew.

Judy and Laura, Jowday and the Moonchild, flickered out of existence together.  Phillip Jeffries squeezed his eyes shut and gave a cry that was half scream and half sob, as tears and blood ran down to his chin.  Cooper too felt sad and lost, but already he couldn’t quite remember whom he was missing.

 _We both loved the dreamer,_ Dale Cooper thought.  _We lived in her dream, but now it’s ended, and we will—what will we—_

He did not finish the thought because by then, he and Phillip were gone too.  After a moment, the little island had faded away, and nothing remained but the Dark Ocean, from which all the realities sprung.

\--

The End

 


End file.
